Anchorage
by Some Magician
Summary: Two weeks before Thanksgiving 2013, Claire is kidnapped. Unable to help, Sherry entreats Jake to rescue her. After the mission is said and done, the three end up spending the holiday together because "fair's fair," and Claire pays Jake for his services in food and Black Friday shopping. But like the missions in their work lives, nothing ever goes as planned. J/S, and a lotta Gen.
1. Chapter 1

Like Batman and Commissioner Gordon, they met on a rooftop, but unlike comic book chumps, they met on a distinctly _dark_ rooftop—without a spotlight even. Smog and storm clouds choked out the stars, making a pale and blurry smudge of the full moon. The only light leaked up from the city below. Headlights filled the nighttime throughways like low-hanging stars moving ponderous as planets through the clogged traffic.

And Sherry stood with her back to him, her hands in gray, knit gloves and held tight against her chest. She didn't even pretend to smile, her face drawn with seriousness—and worry. Somebody honked down on the streets, and the monotony of sound on the roof fell back into a distant, automotive humming. Jake went to cough in the quiet—

"Jake," she started instead, finally facing him. "I really need your help." She asked for it in a conspicuously un-Super girl fashion without any of the polite demanding that dragged him around the world from cold Eldonia over Christmas last year to Lanshiang freaking _frying_ in June just a few months ago. There were also some—_'Uh…'_—_months_ spent in a research facility too, but, _'that's not really her fault.'_

The urban glow lit her face from below, an unhappy shining in her eyes, and she looked like she might actually cry. The girly fluffiness of her civilian clothes made it worse. Jake broke eye-contact for just a moment, frowning.

"With what?"

[- - -]

When he'd tracked these guys to Chicago, he had hoped they'd actually _be_ in Chicago, nothing like a high-flying rescue mission tearing through the windy city by the lake, see the sights, shoot up some bad guys, but this shit—this shit was almost fucking Indiana.

_'And I don't want to go back to Indiana_,' Jake thought dryly. Because there was _jack shit_ in Indiana, except this warehouse apparently. He opened his PDA, which politely informed him, via its internal GPS, that he was still in Illinois, rural Illinois but Illinois none the less. _'Well, thank God for that.'_

Sherry's plea for his help had turned out rather simple for all the fuss she raised asking for it. Somebody had kidnapped her friend, and she couldn't do anything about it. The friend was a small-time political figure and activist working in 'anti-bioterrorism-related human rights issues,' as Sherry's notes described, but the politics of the situation ended up delicate, dicey enough that the Secret Service tied her hands.

"I don't have any real intel," she had said that night back on the roof. "I can't even tell you a name, because agents aren't supposed to get involved. But—but I can tell you where my friend was seen last and—"

"Man, you take me on bad dates," he had said, early November turning his breath to fog. "Fine. Gimmie what ya got."

A day or so later, he camped out in a crop of trees at the corner of four barren cornfields, laid to brown and lifeless waste by the autumn harvest. The sky did nothing for the ugly, dead country as it stirred slow, and gray, and bleary overhead. A wind blowing south pulled through the winter-parched copse, agitating branches and shaking down their leaves. Across the scarred cornfield, acres of broken stalk still cutting up from the unturned earth, a trio of black SUVs parked at the doors of the only facility in a half-finished industrial park. The still-coming punches of recession had crashed its development hard, and the abandoned walls and beams of a second building sat above the ruin of the corn like the empty bones of a long exposed rib-cage.

Meanwhile, Jake waited for night to fall, blue and early, as a fourth car appeared from the highway and pulled into the lot, and a single, ghostly streetlight appeared at the edge of the park-road. With the long expanse of field satisfyingly dark, he stood up from his spot and hit the ground running.

Breaking into the facility was easy enough; the guards posted in the cars and the entryways were very human and certainly not expecting him to drop by. So, the welcome party was a little lackluster, and he left the dozen or so grunts he found patrolling the empty complex in an office in a pile, wrists zip-tied and guns dismantled. He believed in leaving lessons behind for thugs; the summer of 2013 had left him something of a changed man, and ever since, he felt a quiet duty to others in his ruthless line of work. So, after the men lay deeply sleeping and bound in the dark, he turned on a nearby desk-lamp and pointed its spot of light at the 'message' he had left for them on the floor, written in the pieces of their weapons: 'Don't kidnap people, assholes'.

Jake shut the office-door and returned to his job. They had tucked the hostage away in another office at the end of the long hallway cutting through the second floor of the warehouse. The door was sealed with a key card, and luckily, he had four key-cards to pick from in the pockets of the guys back in the other room. Jake slid his new access card through the reader-slot, and it screamed, a long, agonized, unchanging _bleeeeeep—_

He squinted like Eastwood, his lips a concrete line, and told the lock: "I don't like you either." He pried out the pins of the hinges, drew his body back a step, and devastated the door with a hard, solid kick to the lock. The door snapped forward, cutting off the card-reader mid-eternal-_bleep_ and spraying splinters of veneer across the commercial carpet tiles. The shrapnel stopped just short of a shape tied to a chair in the darkness. Jake felt for a light-switch, and a swaying fluorescent tube poured light down in flickers across the room. The hostage slumped against his chair, his chest and arms bound in rope with extra wraps of duct tape on his wrists and ankles, and a black, fabric bag tossed over his head. Jake hunkered down on one knee, split the duct-tape binding the hostage's legs, and rooted his knife under the rope.

"Anyway, how do you do today, sir," he said, working the bonds loose. "I am your independent third-party contractor." After some sawing, the rope thinned and broke, falling in a loop around the chair. He belted his knife and hoisted the hostage out of the chair and over his shoulder. "I operate on a variable pricing scale," he explained, heading for the door, "and for a group like Terra Save, that'll be 45k per man extracted and delivered—"

Jake had been wrong, and _her_ knee, sharp with bone, and her kick, strong with muscle, punched, with a downright cruel calculation in his opinion, into his stomach for it. Jake gasped—"_Shit."_—and cringed against the doorframe, and she slid off his shoulder, finding her footing again.

"Terra Save is a non-profit without the resources for overpriced rescues," the woman said, shucking the duct tape from her wrists. "I'm sure they can pay you 5 grand for cutting some ropes, but I can walk the rest of the way." She worked her hands under the hood and dragged it up and over her head. An auburn, mussed ponytail fell free of the bag and over the hostage's shoulder, her blue eyes dancing in the unfamiliar brightness.

Jake squashed the pain twisting his gut through the tightness in his lungs. He coughed, his chest loosening and his body remembering it had _breathing_ to do.

"Bunch of lawyers can't spare some pocket change—" He spluttered at the edge of his sentence.

"I said we are a nonprofit," she repeated and tossed the black hood away. Like many hostages, she hadn't dressed for the occasion, and wore long, dark gray slacks, that moved like water with every step she took, and a red knit sweater, silver winks and shines woven in the cables, with a yellow corsage at her breast, a flattened golden rose and a lemon-colored carnation over a spout of baby's breath. She wore no shoes and stepped carefully to the side on nothing but black, nylon stockings. She found a path for herself through the shattered wood to a desk on the far side of the room cluttered with boxes.

"I was abducted from _a taxi_ on my way to the Next Step conference," she started and then shook her head, like it was funny. "I was going to take the L-train to McCormick Place, but my colleague thought I'd get mugged—if only she knew." She looked through the first of boxes and turned up a black leather purse and a jacket that clearly belonged to her. "Did you see a pair of Nine West's around here?" She knocked the empty box unceremoniously off the desk and searched another.

"Those shoes?" Jake asked.

"Yes—never mind," she said, producing a pair of sleek and polished matte-leather boots. "And you're Jake Muller, right?"

"Yeah, how'd you know?"

"Sherry told me about you," the woman said. She hiked up the flowing leg of her pants and slipped into the first of her boots. It zipped up smartly, the fabric falling graciously over the cut of the boot. "I'm Claire."

"Huh, Sherry told me about you. Claire Redfield—Esquire?"

"Yes," she said, smiling slightly. "Technically." She stood up straight on her finished boots and shrugged on her jacket. "Sorry about the kick." She tugged the jacket into place and made for the door, the length of hallway beyond stretching long and shadowy. The clouds had parted, and a bolt of waning moonlight filled the far window. "It's just—$45,000 is not a funny joke, and I haven't been in a hostage situation for a long time. I sat for three hours last night listening to my cellphone battery die and wondered if I would be—_next_ this time, and—" She sighed, deep and irritated, and stopped in the threshold.

_'What,'_ Jake thought, trying to parse out that bit about dying cellphones and _actually_ dying, but hostage situations always made people a little loopy. The trapped often made _unusual _associations in the silence of duct-tape, the dark of hoods, and the embrace of chains.

"Are you coming?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'm coming," he snapped, catching up to her with just a few strides. Trickles of Sherry's 'super girl' ego suddenly seemed connected to a well-source.

"Okay, don't contact Terra Save about this," Claire continued as they walked, gray doors with room numbers wrenched off and office names defaced passing by. "We don't have the HR or the budget ready to deal with this. Contact Sherry, and I'll get back to you through her. You'll be paid—"

"Yeah, no, it doesn't work like that, lady," Jake said, halting in the hallway. "You pay, or I put you back in the office and let the goons loose again." She threw a hard look back at him, her eyes narrow.

"I'm grateful you saved me," Claire said. "But my organization cannot pay $45,000—"

"Well, then what can you pay?"

Claire paused, her defenses slackening and her—frankly—lawyer-speak backing off. _'I…didn't expect this,'_ she thought and shook free of her dumbstruck.

"I told you already," she said. "_I_ can pay you $5,000 and—" She dug in her purse suddenly, forced open her wallet, and pulled out a plastic card decorated in a spread of oak leaves, perfectly blended red and orange, and a round and golden pumpkin pie dolloped with organic whipped cream. "—and this."

"This?"

"TerraSave 'gifts' me a prepaid card for a pie from Whole Foods, if it's still November—I can pay you $5,000," she said. "$5,000, and that."

"Classy bonus," Jake said and took the gift card from her. Claire stared blankly at where it had been, a dizzy blurriness creeping in from her peripheral vision. A cut, long and thin, slanted down her right index finger and into her palm; it stung when she stretched her fingers.

Jake dipped the card into the inside pocket of his jacket and said, "I'll think about it."

Claire's vision sharpened massively, the dull hallway of the warehouse coming into astronomical focus.

"You'll _think_ about it?"

"Now's not the time. Let's go already."

[ - - - ]

Jake had been right—that _wasn't_ the time, and Claire's adrenaline leveled off with the roar of the bike beneath her even if she wasn't the one driving. The bleak, dried out countryside skipped away along 394, houses rising from the trees and tightening together into neighborhoods disrupted by explosions of towering factories, high-rises, and cathedrals as the city rolled closer, rippling cement walls pulling up between them and the subdivisions lining the highway.

An hour into the cold and wind-blown ride, Jake said, "Up there's your extraction point."

The bike drifted along the shoulder of the highway and up a ramp into a curl of road sliding across the bridge overhead. Jake braked and cut his engine, the bike rumbling low through the city night. Claire, unfamiliar with riding as a passenger, stepped shakily onto the curb.

"Oh, Claire!" a voice called, and as Claire's ears shook off the perpetual hum of the bike, Sherry dashed over from the puddle of light beneath a streetlight.

"Extraction point, and escort," Jake said. "I think that's more than worth 5 grand."

Claire shook her head, ignored him, and met Sherry with an easy smile while rapids of white headlights, the blinding eyes of dark, sharkish cars, coursed underneath the overhang.

"I'm glad you aren't running off by yourself anymore," she told Sherry.

"But _I'm_ not glad he's charging," Sherry said, and she glared back at Jake. "5 grand, Jake? _Why?_"

"She talked me down from 45k. I'm running a frigging Black Friday special for you two."

"He seems nice," Claire said, taking the conversation back from the two of them. "And he did a good job," she added a little louder for her independent contractor to hear.

"I knew he would," Sherry said with a sweet confidence, and Claire's gaze grew heavy and serious.

"But _you_ risked a lot to do that for me, even having him do it."

Sherry looked down at the gray tips of her boots. "I couldn't just let you—"

"I wasn't going to die—"

"I knew that—they weren't very good kidnappers," Sherry said. "I looked into everything I could get into, but—the BSAA wouldn't act—Chris wouldn't—"

"I'm going to—talk to him about that. Doing this isn't _your_ job—" Claire put a hand on Sherry's shoulder.

"But I'm an agent now," Sherry reminded her, her voice light and sober at once. "Saving other people _is _my job." Claire smiled again and squeezed Sherry's shoulder.

"Then, thank you," she said. "For getting involved."

"Of course! I'm glad I got you back before the holiday!"

Claire let go and swung back for a look at Jake.

"Speaking of holidays," she said, crossing her arms over her chest, "do you two go anywhere for Thanksgiving?"

Sherry chewed her lip, suddenly quiet.

"Home," Jake said.

"Where's home?" Claire asked.

"Wherever I feel like it."

Claire laughed lightly for the first time in days, and it filled her like the first warm breath taken after breaking through ice. Her lungs almost hurt, the heat invigorating and overwhelming, as her teeth seemed to buzz and chatter.

"You both should come to my place then."

"Really?" Sherry asked.

"Yeah, I'll cook," Claire promised.

Jake leaned back on his sports-bike and stroked his chin.

"I don't know—"

Claire reached into the pocket of her jacket and produced her Whole Foods gift card with a fox's grin, sharp and sly.

"Don't you want your pie?"


	2. Chapter 2

"I don't think I've ever been so—so—_so mad_ at him," Claire said to the office as she sat on her counselor's warm, pumpkin-colored sofa, one hand at her temple as she leaned on the sofa-arm. A sunset-stained Tiffany lamp lit the little room, the light catching on the beaded mosaics stitched into the couch's decorative pillows. Claire's fingers itched to pick at them.

"But I invited him for the holiday next week anyway," she went on, the counselor saying nothing. "I invite him every year—for Christmas too. He—he doesn't come. Anymore."

Now, the counselor, a polished woman with carefully coiffed gray hair and a pale sage-colored suit, spoke.

"And what do you feel when he does that?"

Claire sat up straight, dropping her hand in her lap.

"What do you mean what do I feel?"

"I meant," the counselor said, gentle and firm, "how does it make you feel when your brother does not come for holidays?"

Claire paused, glancing from the warmth of the Tiffany lamp into the November night slowly flooding the window. The sky outside twisted in the languid whorls of a still red sunset slowly smothered by a deepening, blue darkness.

"Guilty."

[ - - - ]

"All right, Turkey," Claire said. "You ready for this?"

The last Frozen Lil' Butterball Turkey in the city, weighing in at just eight pounds, had finally thawed after spending three days in its future roasting pan and taking up an entire shelf of Claire's fridge. If all went according to plan, it would transform from a soft, pink, beheaded bird into a savory, herb-roasted turkey in just three and a half hours. By 4PM, only she and Martha Stewart (or whoever wrote the recipe) would know what flavorless, flesh-bag horror she had started with.

_'I think I'm ready for this.'_ Claire split the netting, peeled off the plastic wrap, and reached into the stomach of the turkey. One by one, she dragged out its little, prepackaged sacks of liver, heart, and giblets. They slopped into her sink, redness seeping through the mushy bags.

"Okay!" she said aloud, rinsing the gut-juices from her hands. Then, while the turkey waited, Claire started up a basting wash of olive oil, dried basil, and ground sage finished off with crushed sea salt and black pepper—just like Rachael Ray or whoever said.

_'I'm too cool for garlic powder,'_ she thought, deviating from the recipe with two tablespoons of fresh garlic. _'And I haven't got any anyway_,' and the grocery stores would be insane until the long-dreaded dinner-hour passed and the madness moved on to the malls opening at midnight.

[ - - - ]

"What does that guilt feel like?"

Claire avoided the eyes of her counselor for the titles of her books, books of social anxiety, depression, and abuse, books that didn't apply to her; she skipped her gaze away, looking into the corners of the ceiling and the floor.

"I don't know," Claire answered when nothing more helpful appeared from the crooks of the room. "It's _guilt_," she said plainly. "It makes me angry—I'm mad he didn't come—it's—it's not just about missed holidays anymore. It's about—why I came here." She leaned forward, her hands meeting in anxious prayer over her knees. "And how his—his job doesn't end."

"Then, let's go back to why you came here," the counselor suggested.

[ - - - ]

Some long and sticky twenty minutes of stuffing and basting later, the turkey roasted slowly at a comfortable 325 degrees. Other dishes, prepped during the days before, waited for baking in foil trays and glass pans in the fridge. Claire had followed her 'game-plan,' as the cooking magazine had called it, pretty much to a T—besides the garlic and some other substitutes and, um, the turkey-thawing time.

_'And I did it all by myself,'_ she thought, flexing her chef's muscles as she sat in a barstool at her countertop and congratulated herself on her approaching kitchen victory with a cup of chai tea spicy with cinnamon. Cheers! She toasted no one with her mug. Who ever said workaholics couldn't find the time to cook Thanksgiving dinner?

There was only a cake left to put together since Whole Foods made the pumpkin pie and the appallingly expensive organic whipped cream (which the gift card had meticulously _not_ covered the cost of).

But the cake could wait as the clock over the oven read 12:17PM.

_'Guests'll be here any minute, I think.'_ Claire set her mug down with a dull clunk and admitted, _'And turkeys are tougher than I thought_—'

Her cellphone rang, a particular jingle singing out through the apartment, as 'BUZZER' flashed across the screen.

[ - - - ]

"I came here because I was kidnapped last week. It's—that's happened to me before," Claire said, "since, well, my—my _work-life_ isn't exactly _typical_." She paused hard to think, looping slowly back through her anger, her words, and unraveling the strings of feelings, thoughts, and dreaming tangents tangled around the _reason_ she came here. "But that's never scared me before. I always felt, like if I was really in trouble, I could count on Chris.

"And now," she said, "I don't feel like I can anymore. I really needed him—and he didn't come." She stopped again, and the counselor bore the silence regally. But the stillness wrapped Claire, bared its teeth, and tightened its coils around her until she had to continue, even if her voice rattled, stiff and slow, at first. "And he hasn't _been_ coming, and I've been—ignoring it."

The counselor shifted at that, tilting her head just so as her pen dangled, pendulous, at her chin.

"So, what do you plan to do with that knowledge?"

"What will I do?"

The counselor nodded.

"I'm—I'm not going to wait around anymore—right now," Claire said after another long, gripping pause in the python's silence. "I—I can have a good holiday—even if he's not there." Her voice threatened to crack, to hitch, and she swallowed. "I invited some—friends over this year, who don't have a lot of family either. I'm going to cook and everything, the works." And she smiled in spite of herself, and her counselor smiled back, natural and knowing.

"That's wonderful, Claire!" she said, putting her pen down on the empty notepad in her lap. "Is this your first time?"

"Yes—I've—I've always catered before, or Chris cooked. My job's—pretty demanding too."

"Oh, I'm happy for you! That sounds like fun!" The counselor set the book and pen aside and folded one leg over the other. "Half the work is waiting on the turkey; I leave mine to thaw for about four days or so."

"You—_what? Four days? _It—does it really take that long—"

[ - - - ]

Jake stood, arms crossed, and resisted fidgeting in the drafty entryway. He waited between the exterior and the interior doors with the lobby's cold architecture boxed around him like the narrow, angular heart of a robot. Despite the smallness, the ceiling seemed to rise on forever as towers of steel and glass bound together in triangular-braces overhead. Such modernism did nothing for the chill, and even with all the sleekness, the buzzer still sounded frigging obnoxious.

It was also awkward as hell waiting in the entryway to this—this woman's apartment.

_'I can't believe I'm doin' this—'_ Except he _knew_ he was doing this, committing his day to this, since he'd been informed by a certain 'contact' that Claire would only endorse the check at her apartment on November 28, 2013, and that contact seemed okay with this because she wasn't sure he'd still go otherwise. _'Girls,'_ Jake grumbled to himself. He had been strong-armed into going already two weeks ago, and he was _going _to go! _'I said I would!'_

All this 'insurance' was totally unnecessary—and the buzzer answered him, a low, metallic tone sounding in the lock of the main doors as they clicked open. Jake grabbed the metal, geometric slab of the handle and stepped inside onto the lobby's massive squares of vanilla marble, the door hesitating on its hinge behind him.

A blast of cold air shot through him from out in the entryway and with it, came a _familiar _voice: "Hey, wait up!"

He caught the main door before it locked shut again, and Sherry's face lit up, her cheeks rosy from late November's briskness. The color stayed as she slipped inside, still smiling, and ran her fingers through her wind-blown, blonde hair. She left her hair alone and shuddered in the jarring shift from the practically Baltic air outside to the tropic warmth of the lobby, even as she shrugged out of her white, puffy jacket. Her clothes crackled with static.

There was some—some _word_ for her actions and the glow about her face—some adjective that escaped him right now.

"You still cold or somethin'?" Jake asked. They waited together in front of the elevator as Sherry pulled off her gloves and smoothed out her sweater dress, a soft, pearly affair with capped sleeves worn with a gray belt and black leggings, with her bare hands.

"A little," Sherry said. "She's on the twenty-seventh floor."

The doors opened onto a neat, little gray room wrapped with a bold, clear acrylic banister. A sunken alcove sat in the back wall hung with a small wreath. Sherry stepped on, coat folded over in her arms, and waited while Jake took up the opposite wall. The doors shut, and a light carol filled the cabin as the elevator lifted through the floors.

"You look nice today," Sherry said over the soft undertoning of 'It's a Marshmallow World'. Jake had dressed up a bit in a dark green button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up over his elbows, and pitch-black jeans. His mother would have heard and stirred from sleep of her very grave if he hadn't, and that wasn't how he intended to meet her again.

"Uh, thanks."

And the doors chimed.

[ - - - ]

At the seventeenth door on the twenty-seventh floor, Sherry's voice rang musically up and down the corridor striped in emerald and ivory carpet and lit with the washed out light of a sky sunless and overcast.

"Hi Claire! Thanks for inviting us!"

"Hey!" Claire said, stepping aside in her doorway and morgue's draft slipping in from the corridor. "Did you guys find the place okay?"

"Yup!" Sherry said.

They met in a rustling storm of welcoming noise, rustling coats and squeaking shoes. Sherry stepped out of ashy-blue ankle boots after a bit of fiddling with the buckles. She teetered uncertainly, her coat rolled under her free arm.

"Lemme hold that," Jake interrupted, taking the coat from her.

"Thank you."

"So, did you two come together—" Claire asked, opening up the coat closet and making some space on the crowded rack. Motorcycle jackets and tawny-colored peacoat overstuffed the closet already while a black helmet, some hats, and a football lurked on the upper-shelf. Jake handed over the jackets, Sherry's short, shiny white down-coat and his black, woolen field jacket. Claire took his first and found a hanger for it before she reached back for Sherry's.

"No," Jake said roughly. "We just met up—"

"Oh, I like your sweater, Sherry," Claire continued, hanging up the second coat.

"Thanks! I just got it the other day! I found at Bloomingdale's." Sherry dropped into a thrilled whisper. "On _clearance_!"

"I'm—I'm not brave enough for Bloomingdale's. Even clearance," Claire said, shoving back the most unruly of her coats and closing up the closet again. "They're a bit out of my price range—"

"You just have to look really hard," Sherry went on.

"Yeah, but I'm not patient enough for that kind of shopping—"

Apparently, no one cared about his explanation.

_'Girls,'_ Jake thought.

And with that, Claire took them through her living room on a brief tour of the two-bedroom apartment overlooking the city draped in cloud. Here was the nexus of her humble abode, with its Spartan bookshelves, hard-wood floors, and leather furniture gathered around a coffee-table and a 32-inch TV sitting in front of the wall-to-wall window, its red curtains tied back. From there, the living room connected to the dining room, the kitchen, and the hallway that fed back to her office and a bedroom.

"Anyway, bathroom's back that way too," Claire said, getting the important geography out of the way. "Do you want anything to drink? I've got some hot water left." Jake shook his head, and Sherry followed Claire into the kitchen to raid her tea bag canister. Their voices carried back to Jake in the muted living room.

"How's 'honey lemon ginseng' green tea?" Sherry asked.

"It's okay," Claire said. "I don't really like green tea. I have some bags of Bengal Spice in there though—if you like that brand."

Jake stepped out of the radius of the other conversation and glanced down into the long drop into nothing outside Claire's window. Twenty-seven floors down, the nothing fell into an intersection where a solitary car pulled away from the light, and a little, old woman with a little, old dog walked the empty crosswalk and into the shadow of the building. The trees below bent and shuddered in a cold wind that dragged at the little woman's coat as she passed the only other person walking on the street, a man distant and small, his coat a smudge of black and gray. The little, old lady's balance tilted on the walk, her purple, floppy hat slipping and a newspaper dancing along the gutter, and the man caught her elbow.

The little dog barked, a brilliant sunspot opening in the gray horizon, and Jake looked out of the light and back into the comfortably dim front room. He left the window and sat down on Claire's sofa, cluttered with striped pillows, and the cushions sunk beneath him. A trio of framed film posters lined the wall above him and the couch. Cowboys sketched in photorealistic, 70s-style posed across them with six-shooters, fistfuls of dynamite, and crooked, gravestone titles: _Duck, You Sucker!, My Name is Nobody,_ and_ Two Mules for Sister Sara_. The apartment around him smelled like seasoned meat roasting and _'Lady,'_ he thought frankly, a blended scent of sharply cinnamon potpourri, lingering perfumes, and, well, dryer sheets.

"Where do you get all these? I didn't even know they had these flavors—"

The others' voices grew closer.

"My aunt takes me to the Celestial Seasonings factory whenever I go home to visit. She thinks they don't have anything besides Sleepytime outside of Denver. She buys way too much—" Claire appeared from the dining room with Sherry and tea in tow. "You don't have to sit out here by yourself."

"Not much of a tea guy," Jake said, stretching into the pillows like he was comfortable there.

"Well, I hope you like coke," Claire said, putting a chilled can down on the coffee table in front of him. "Coke's pretty manly."

"I didn't need anything to drink—" Jake started again.

"Well, now you don't have to get up when you do," Claire said, sitting in the armchair just opposite him, and Sherry plopped down in the side of the sofa between them. "The turkey needs some time, so we're going to watch—"

"The Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade," Sherry finished, finding a coaster for her mug. "I haven't seen it in a really long time!"

"We're watching a parade?"

"We're watching a parade," Claire said, finding a seat on a nearby armchair and working her TiVo.

TiVo made the hours roll back, and 9 o'clock in the morning on November 28, 2012 reappeared at the corner of 77th street and Central Park West as cart-wheeling clowns spilled onto the empty throughway flanked by colorful walkers on stilts and ground acrobats all moving in time to the pulse of the high school marching band leading the way. The talking heads broadcasting the event cooed and commented, congratulating the high school band opening the parade yet again and hinting at some Euro-pop boy band's performance to come, before they announced the first of Macy's massive balloons, a blue hedgehog, bumping shoulders with the New York skyscrapers, pulled along by a team of blue men.

"Is that freaking Sonic?" Jake asked. Sherry took a messy sip of her tea and put her cup down, giggling.

"Of course it's Sonic!"

_'Oh, boys,'_ thought Claire.

The floats paraded on, and in the middle of the seventh show-choir to dance by, Claire got up to check if her dead bird was an edible turkey yet.

_'We're getting there.'_ The turkey browned nicely in the red glow of the oven, and Claire straightened, meeting the blue appointment card pinned neatly to her fridge with a magnet at eye-level. It reminded her in cool, even penmanship that her next, and second, appointment with Dr. Erika Reeds was still scheduled for the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, December 5th.

Claire took the card down.

[ - - - ]

"I'm making a mistake being so mad about this, aren't I?"

"Why do you say that?" Dr. Reeds asked.

"Just tell me straight," Claire insisted, and Dr. Reeds shook her head.

"It wouldn't help you for me to judge," she said primly. "You have lived an unusual life, Claire, but I am not convinced you need to see me for anything more than a mental check-up." She smiled, the lines gathering at the corners of her lips. "You've also undergone some significant stress lately, but not a level I feel you can't handle." She paused suddenly, dipping her head as her casual and even proud smile thinned. "But I will say that if your brother is not receptive to hearing you out at this time, continuing to see me might bring you some comfort. Let's set an appointment for after the holiday? I want to hear how your Thanksgiving goes."

Claire sat with that in her mind, the reassurance of sanity, the possibility of future pain, and what might be decided in the days to come—if anything at all.

"All right," she said.

[ - - - ]

A small dog yapped out in the hallway, but the noise in the front-room buried its high bark.

_'Sounds like someone's having fun,'_ Claire thought with a grin. She opened the junk drawer in her kitchen and tucked the appointment card away—out of sight. _'Even if we practically had to pull teeth to get him here—'_

The dog barked distantly again through the walls, and Claire hunted through her cabinets, bringing down a jar of maraschino cherries, canned pineapple, flour, salt, and sugar, and so many other pieces of a cake that soon grew too small to name.

Again, through the walls, the dog barked, and a door knocker rose and fell in three, militant stops, but it sounded far, perhaps at one of her neighbor's doors. Claire lingered at the counter-side, the ingredients laid out still in chaos, and turned her attentions to boiling up more hot water.

Except they knocked again, and the sound came too fiercely at her own door.

"Is that your door?" Sherry asked. "I can get it—"

"No, don't worry," Claire said, leaving the water to boil slowly. "I've got it." She smiled and stepped out into the living room. Out in the corridor, the barks and grumbling of the dog cleared. _'I know that bark,'_ Claire though, it belonged to a dog with an adorably old name, Mr. Tuddles, who lived with an adorably old woman a few doors down, Mrs. Benson, and Mrs. Benson, in her adorable and lonely ancientness, sometimes liked to stop by to chat. _'Why not a holiday?'_

"Is Buzz Lightyear really in this?" Jake asked with concealed interest.

"Of course, he is," Sherry said. "Didn't you watch these when you were little?"

"No—where I come from this kind-of thing is—frivolous." And Jake said the word like it didn't belong to him.

A quiet fell, and the announcers filled the lull with more hype about the floats to come, a Hello Kitty balloon and a grand finale of a musical performance. Claire slid quickly in front of the TV and left the other two alone for the entryway. She lifted the latch, opened her front door, and paused there in the cool draft of the corridor. The man on her doorstep was an aching stranger, too painfully unfamiliar, but still blood of her blood. _'He looks like…Dad,'_ she thought, the heavy brows and jaw and the dark and somber color of his eyes and hair finding a place in her memory, a fleeting snapshot of a warm afternoon before a long trip into a night that hadn't ever lifted.

"Chris," Claire gasped. "Chris—Hi."

[ - - - ]

Chapter 3, if not chapter 4, will be up sometime next week, between 12/12 and 12/14. =) Thank you so much for reading. Feedback will motivate me and make writing Chapter 4 go faster! So, do keep that in mind as you pass the review/favorite/follow buttons.

Now, before I go, I must thank my betas, GG and two anon's, for their work reading this piece.


	3. Chapter 3

Chicago thrummed through Claire, its perpetual sound and motion vibrating in her veins as she left the glassy doors of the Essex Inn for the sidewalk of Michigan Ave on this stony, colorless midmorning of November 14, 2013. In the loop to the west, behind her and her hotel, the L-trains roared on their metal paths, and ahead of her, on the eastern side of the reach of Grant Park and the low wall of Lake Shore Drive, the freshwater beat of the cold lake at its piers and shores.

Her phone said it would be sunny today. The afternoon would take strength and break through the clouds clogging the sky in time for the sun, rich and apple-ruddy, to spill across the city as it dipped behind the skyscrapers, before the night turned the lake to iron under the towers of light splitting the blackness.

"Are you nervous, Miss Keynote Speaker?" her colleague, her friend had asked her not moments before up in her hotel room as she set her hair to rights, her bangs all caught up with static from the sweater and the season's dryness.

"Erin, if you keep that up," Claire had said, looking away from the mirror where she swept out her hair with her fingers and wrapped it up again in its classic ponytail, "I might start thinking there's something to be nervous about."

And Erin laughed and said, "Where do you get your confidence?"

Claire was a girl from the mountains after all, and Chicago pulsed around her in all its vastness, cool and preoccupied. _'The city's still so big,' _she thought; it teamed withthe kind of claustrophobic millions her mind could barely contain, a different animal altogether from Denver. And after her transfer from her home chapter of Terra Save completed, it would become her city—whether it felt like it or not.

"I'm born with it," Claire had said, and then, they talked briefly of her travel plans; the 'Next Step: Human Recovery after C' conference awaited after all, and in commemoration of her transfer, her promotion, and her service to Terra Save, to humanity, since the beginning of this harsh and frightened era, Claire would present as the first of seven keynote speakers.

_'And I'm speaking at the opening ceremony,'_ she thought on the city ground, feeling winded with anticipation of that crowd, that crowd of press people, colleagues, and leaders from the world over, even as her breath fogged on her lips. _'The opening ceremony—'_ She clutched her hands in her pocket, and her fingers curled around a battered ten-dollar bill.

"The buses are crazy this time of year, believe me, I know," Erin had said with all the certainty of a Chicago native since birth. "Take a cab."

"I can handle a crowd—"

"Trust me," Erin had said, handing her the folded cab-fare. "_I know_."

Claire stepped up to the curbside, the rumble of the street, a stream of cars, and cabs, and buses, filling her ears, and hailed.

[ - - - ]

Chris knocked at 2717's door, and nobody came. He stepped back, his hands buried in his pockets and his eyebrows knitted as he waited. The chill of the wind-blasted city still clung in his bones, his right hand ungloved and grasping idly around the cellphone in his pocket.

He waited, the corridor hugging close with the silence and the chill of a morgue washed out in the overexposure of the afternoon light.

And still, no one came. Chris shifted from one foot to other and stood with legs apart, head bowed, and hands still in the pockets of his jacket.

Maybe this wasn't Claire's apartment.

Commercial paintings hung in the white spaces between the warm, cherry wood doors, static windows of oil pastures and engraved, crystal vases running over with sunflowers and drunkenly tilting lilies, but the painted vase between 2717 and 2716 was empty with a scattering of knick-knacks, a broken copper cigar case, mismatched dice, a letter-opener, and a toppled tea-cup, on the table blanketed in antique, ivory lace beneath it.

Chris ignored the weird painting and pulled out his phone, his finger bones still icy and stiff.

_'I've never been to this apartment,'_ he remembered, downplaying to himself that this wouldn't be the first apartment of Claire's that he'd never visited. He slid open the lock and checked the address, and her text.

_'Okay,_' this was Claire's apartment, he was in the right place, and he put his phone away, an unintended shiver in his fingers. He went to knock again and stopped, the subtlest sounds of a football game lapping into the hallway from the doors around him.

He broke his hesitation and knocked as he had before, three stops, the door hollow beneath them, and no one came. No one called 'Coming!' or 'Hang on!' through the door, and no steps preluded any voice at all.

Maybe she wasn't home. His stomach twisted compulsively.

_'I was invited,'_ Chris thought dumbly, and he remembered the invitation, its textual blankness, habitual as an automated message. Only the new address deviated it from any other holiday invite before. In years past, he always had his own stale responses. _'Not gonna make it this year,' 'I'll think of you guys, you should see the weather in…' _Africa, Edonia, China, in _wherever_ he happened to be 'working,' his work creating and killing men and monsters at the same time. _'Say hi to Aunt Liz for me.'_

Then, the door opened, and sound spilled out of the apartment and his sister, his tall and thin sister with tied-up mahogany hair and ocean-side eyes, stood in her doorway. She had bloomed into a feminine alien in their family, so tall and so red-headed; _he_ ended up looking more like their mom and aunts than she did.

She wore a sweater with one of those floppy, wide necks, and sort-of flowy pants that kind-of looked like jeans; he was no good at clothes and stuff.

_'Fancy for Thanksgiving,'_ he thought and opened his mouth to speak.

Except she was staring, her eyes aimed at but beyond him, unblinking, and she leaned on her doorframe, like she needed the lift. She searched his face hard, she sized him up like—'_A stranger,'_ Chris realized and ducked his head to the side, dodging the weight of her gaze. As soon as he did, Claire blinked, breaking from her trance.

"Hey," she said, pushing her door open. "I'm sorry. Come—come on in."

[- - -]

For five minutes, the taxis ignored her and several people waiting along the avenue as the flow of cabs held close to the sludge of traffic down the center lanes. As someone honked far up the street, thunder broke in the sky, and it began to rain, gray and autumnal, dots darkening her clothes as mist clung in Claire's hair. A green cab finally pulled from the line and rolled up beside a gentleman a step or so up the street.

She shivered and glanced aside, feeling the subtle, feather-weight of a stare. The gentleman, clean and neatly-shaven, watched her as he stood with the door to the cab hanging open.

The rain thickened, striking the Chicago cement and steel harder, a thousand nails falling.

The gentleman smiled, handsomely, with the warm, friendly face of an actor and called out over the rising metal pound of the rain.

"Care to join me?"

[- - -]

Claire's apartment smelled like holiday food and sounded like a parade, electric cheering and euro-pop music pouring from the flatscreen against her front-window. The throw pillows on her couch were kinked up, a clutter of tea cups and a can of coke left on the coffee table.

"Got guests over, huh?" Chris asked, his voice sounding clunky to his own ears. He never imagined those would be the first words he said to his sister back down in the lobby.

"Yeah, some friends," Claire said, leading him into her kitchen. "You'll already know Sherry, but this is her friend—" The little hallway turned into a niche of sandy-granite countertops and pale cabinets with an island dividing the kitchen from the dining room with its cozy square table, four chairs—

And Jake Muller.

In his sister's apartment. On the other side of her kitchen. Drinking her Coca Cola. On Thanksgiving Day.

The parade suddenly seemed so far away, broadcasting from a lone, abandoned television literally _in_ New York.

"I know who he is," Chris cut her off. "Why is he—"

Jake put the can down with a crisp clink on the granite.

"I was _invited_," he said, putting his hands up. "Didn't expect to see you here—"

"Wait," Claire said. "You two know each other—"

Chris glared at Sherry.

"Didn't you tell her?"

Sherry glared at him back, in her way.

"Of course not, that's _highly_ classified information—"

"Then, why did you bring _him_ here—"

"She didn't, I did—" Claire butted in.

"Why—"

"Because I wanted to invite Sherry," Claire explained plainly, "and it seemed sort-of rude to invite her and blow off her friend—who had just saved my life at the time—"

"He saved—" Chris put the pieces together very quickly with a hard glance at Jake. "You're the 'third party contractor'," he quoted the phrase like a memory, ingrained and very specific. "And you—" He pointed at Sherry. "You brought him into it—"

Sherry met his gaze head-on, short and small-voiced as she was.

"It was Claire, I wasn't just going to leave her—"

"I know it was Claire," he said, like he didn't know _that_ better than anyone. "_I_ was handling it—"

"Not very quickly," Sherry said bluntly.

"That isn't your concern, agent—"

"Okay, enough," Claire interrupted. "No more fighting until the three of you explain to me what is going on—"

"It's a long story—" Jake put in deadpan.

Chris cut him off with a stern, hard look at Sherry and a finger in her direction.

"_You_ started this," he said. "So, you explain it to her, and you—" The finger shifted to Jake. "You're going with me."

"Going with _you_?" Claire inquired. "And just where are you _going_—"

"_We're_ going to throw the pigskin around," Chris said with needless confrontation, and he gambled. Redfield tradition deemed that they always kept their sports-gear in the coat closet. He won and found the old, neglected ball shoved up above the coats and shoes. Jake gaped, the pigskin existed and this was happening, and—

"Let's go," Chris ordered, his voice a physical tug as he dragged Jake out, the apartment slipping back with the sharp slam of the door.

[ - - - ]

The cab pulled away from the street-side and into the steady river of traffic. Claire sat carefully next to the Handsome Guy, the dry heat of the cab sucking the dampness from her clothes, as he didn't speak and one of her legs threatened to jitter. The silence lingered and settled.

_'I've got more important things to think about.' _

As quickly as Handsome Guy appeared, he faded from her awareness and she sunk into the ride, listening to low melodies of cabbie radio and the muffled sounds of the city outside. Her hands shook lightly, sections of her speech rehearsing in her mind. The speech shifted in and out, changing from the photo-memory of her typed notes into the sound of her own voice practicing in her mind's ear.

_'Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure as vice-chair of Terra Save Chicago to welcome you to—'_ The cab knocked suddenly down a turn-lane, cutting off the radio's satellite connection, and the sudden silence tore at her concentration. Claire started again.

_'Ladies and gentlemen…'_

The cab changed lanes and dipped into the sudden darkness of an underpass.

_'This isn't the first time we've had to realize that the world will never be the same again. All of us changed, irrevocably, in 1998. Some of you out there—'_

The tail of the car slid under the viaduct, the backseat blanketed in blackness, with the mouth of the underpass hanging ahead too bright and too crowded.

_'—were too young to realize it as it happened, but I know you never forgot. No one forgets how the world we lived in that morning in September—disappeared, and now, in 2013, we have to change again—'_

A click sounded in the darkness, a hammer sliding into place, and the cold mouth of a gun kissed the back of Claire's ear.

"Good afternoon, Madam Keynote Speaker," said the man in the next seat.

She slammed into him across the seat, and he shoved her back, smashing her face against the window as the gun bit into the skin of her neck in the dark, the white window of the end of the tunnel swinging. The cab drove on, undisturbed, as he forced her still, his free arm wrung around her neck.

"It doesn't matter if you struggle," he said, crushing her arm between her chest and his. "This is your own fault."

"Shut up—" She pushed him back again, and he squeezed her throat harder, the air tearing from her lungs in a burst of brilliance behind her eyes.

"I'll explain slowly," he said. "This is happening to you, I am happening to you, because you trust."

"What—what the hell does that mean—"

"You _trust_. In your innocence, you trusted this cab, you trusted these people, you trusted this city." He paused and she felt his lips twinge and turn in a grin against her earlobe; she cringed. "And you trusted me. And every time, your trust was misplaced."

"So _what_?" she spat back roughly as she wriggled in his grasp, mostly to get his skin off hers. "I'm not afraid of you—you're not doing anything I haven't seen before—"

He shoved her hard, bashing her head into the window and making a minefield of her brain, loaded with bright, blaring spots of pain.

"Don't pretend you understand me, Madam Keynote Speaker," he said. "I understand you, but you don't understand me." He let her fall dizzily against him, her head lolling as the flares of her concussion crumbled into a gentler darkness. "You've never been taken against your will. What hole has Claire Redfield ever woken up in where she didn't mean to be? She trusts this world so, even Umbrella takes her where she needs to go." The gun fell with a dull clunk as he rolled up the sleeve of her sweater, sweat and cool air licking the exposed skin before he stabbed a needle into her forearm. Claire jumped, blood and bruising welling at the puncture, as a cool, tingling sensation washing her body with numbness and dragging on her brain. "But I will tell you what hole you never meant to wake up in," he said, his breath warm against her ear and the light at the end of the tunnel dimming.

"Mine."

[ - - - ]

The case file on the disappearance of Claire Redfield, a thirty-three-year-old, Caucasian woman who was abducted on her way to the Next Step Conference in Chicago, Illinois, opened formally with a series of text messages to the missing person's older brother, Chris Redfield.

The first text message read:

_I'll explain slowly._

In the seconds after, more messages followed, all from the same number, with a sentence each.

_The medium is the message_, said the second.

_And understand that all of man's countless creations are his media, his art._

_The Mona Lisa and the Light bulb are the same, but perhaps the Light bulb is the more valuable._

_It's all right if you don't understand._

_The important part is that which does not have a message is meaningless, that which is not media is meaningless._

The fifth message broke the pattern with a rambling paragraph.

_Before the development of the T-virus, human bodies had no meaning; they are not built by hands. Processes beyond (or below, as context means so much) our understanding cause bodies to be, but a medium serves a purpose; it extends the living body beyond its physical limitations. The limited, human ear can hear for miles—with a cellphone. The limited, human eye can see for miles—with a television. The internet becomes the brain itself, but faster, smarter, better. By itself, a living body does nothing—but trap a mind. But the viruses, by their mediated nature, create meaning where there was only body, empty flesh living for the sake of life. It frees men from their limited bodies as they become the virus, become media._

_The finale: in 72 hours, I will inject the virus into my hostage; I will make media from a meaningless body._

_But perhaps that body has meaning to you._

The text messages ended with a voicemail where a male voice, robotic and throaty, formed from electronic nothing, edged in fuzz. He spoke distantly at first, the words unintelligible until he brought the phone close and said:

"Now, Madam Keynote Speaker, in order to ring in this spectacle properly—"

A second, muffled voice struggled briefly in the background, and Chris heard his sister's capturer drag her hood up over her mouth. She gasped once and inhaled in a hiss through her teeth.

"—I need you to tell our audience your name," the male voice instructed.

She paused, and her lungs heaved and stilled. In Chris's mind's eye, the disheveled curtain of her bangs shadowed her eyes, and a rusty film of dried blood smeared the corner of her lips. She grimaced, the split in her lip opening, the broken flesh raw and pink.

"Go to hell—"

* * *

This chapter took a very long time because almost immediately after I posted it, I took on a crappy, second job. Real Life literally got all up in my creative process's face, per se, but things have since settled down, I can finally get back to work on this.


End file.
